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According to authorities, many people were taken hostage in a town in the central Netherlands on Saturday, causing residences to be evacuated and the town center to close.
According to the police, there is now no cause to suspect a “terrorist motive” for the event in Ede.
“A hostage situation involving several people is underway in a building in the centre” of the town of Ede, police said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter.
It is unclear how many people are being held, although local media reports that four or five people are implicated.
Police said they had cleared a perimeter around a cafe and brought inhabitants from approximately 150 houses to safety.
The Netherlands has had a number of terror acts and conspiracies, but not on the same scale as other European countries such as France or the UK.
In 2019, the Netherlands was rocked by a shooting spree on a tram in Utrecht, which took four lives.
Gokmen Tanis, a Turkish-born man, eventually claimed that the rampage, which nearly shut down the country’s fourth largest city, was motivated by terror.
In 2019, Dutch police charged two alleged jihadists with plotting a terror assault including suicide bombs and car bombs. Authorities stated that an attack was planned that year.
In 2018, a young Afghan man known as “Jawed S.” stabbed two American tourists at Amsterdam Central Station, later telling judges that he wanted “to protect the Prophet Mohammed.”
The attack happened a day after far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders declared that he was canceling a cartoon competition to caricature the Prophet Muhammad.
